


gifts (to be coveted)

by anthropologicalhands



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:34:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22974865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropologicalhands/pseuds/anthropologicalhands
Summary: To steal, to have, to lose, to give. Emori has done it all in the name of love.
Relationships: Emori/John Murphy (The 100)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	gifts (to be coveted)

Rarely has Emori coveted anything the way she does the boy in the desert.

Before the skaikru came to the ground, Emori doesn’t long for things that aren’t possible. Not for family, other than Otan. Not for a home, other than what shelter they find each night. Not even for peace, really, just for long stretches of days between cons when they have enough to survive comfortably.

But then they set their usual trap in the desert, and among the group who walk blindly into it is a boy made up of sharp lines and pale blue eyes who immediately draws Emori’s attention. Who doesn’t avoid her gaze. Who worries that she wouldn’t like him for what he’s done to his own people.

He still tells her. Emori likes him anyways. The bitterness and resignation in his one are familiar tastes to her, not at all unpleasant, and almost sweeter for being shared. Emori almost regrets that Otan’s hiding place is not further up the dunes, so that she might talk to the boy – John, that’s his name—for longer.

She has no remorse for what she must do, what she must do to him, but while she has her knife to his throat a flash of longing flickers through her to take him as well. To separate him, drag him away with the rations and water. It’s a strange feeling.

But she can’t. There is a fine balance to her and her brother’s survival—another living body might tip those scales too far.

Still. He’s a survivor, too. She wants to give him something he can use, even while she strips the rest of his people of their supplies.

She steals a moment for herself, when she pushes him to his knees and whispers a hint for survival in his ear. She cups his jaw as she braces to knock him out, and pretends that it is a gesture of intimacy, instead. 

His skin is softer than she expects.

She brushes away the regret, as she does with bugs or the occasional shiver of loneliness. Emori doesn’t hold any hope in her heart that they will be reunited. Such a burden that emotion would be.

~

She spends far too much time brooding over John in the months that pass, when the woman in the flying machine recruits her and Otan. They wash off the sand in the river and acquire a boat for their new ventures.

Emori does not believe in second chances, so John’s reappearance feels almost like a gift.

Even before she suggests to Otan that they repurpose the tech for other buyers, Emori is already mapping out a plan to steal John. It wouldn’t take much to coax him away from his companions – even on the boat, he keeps close to her, and she cannot blame him for his unease at the unnatural stillness of his companions.

It’s foolish; Emori knows nothing about John beyond the precious drops he gave her after offering his water, during that stretch in the desert they spent together as she led him into a trap. But she doesn’t think he would object to being stolen – she caught the light in his eyes when he saw her, how immediately he followed when she beckoned him.

She likes his eyes, what she sees in them, and the warmth it stirs in her. She’d had a glimmer of that feeling, in the desert. It’s not thirst, but it is almost as imperative.

Otan would accuse her of wanting a toy if he knew her thoughts, and he wouldn’t be wrong – she feels the anticipation of the theft making her fingertips tingle, to mark him up with her fingerprints and keep him held close by her side. Her brother’s frown deepens behind his scarf at how her gaze tracks after John as he moves around their boat, how she teases and challenges him and pays him attention even at the expense of their other marks.

They don’t need John. He would be another mouth to feed, their cuts of profit would be smaller, and the possibility of betrayal. But she wants to _keep_ him. There is no such thing as faith or fate, but she already made the choice to leave him behind once – the right choice, the survivor’s move. But when something you want so badly is dangled in front of you not once but _twice,_ well, why not take it?

Of course, it is not so simple.

But then getting the tech goes wrong, and Otan comes back wrong, and holds a knife to her throat and John throws away the tech to save her life and follow her as quickly as his feet can carry him, and then it’s no longer a question of stealing him, anymore, but having him, and needing to learn what he is for her.

Her heart is still hammering in her chest, filling her throat, as she guides her boat down the river. Racing from nearly being strangled, from Otan’s knife, from the texture of John’s skin still against her lips. John hovers behind her, watching. No one comes after them.

She can feel him as he moves around her, into her peripheral vision, hands gripping the railing.

There is so much in her head right now.

“You saved my life again,” she says, focusing on what she can say. What can be said between them right now.

John turns away from the men they left on the shore, and she sees how the harsh lines of his face soften.

“Yeah,” he says, with a short little laugh, looking away from her. Away from her lips. “Kinda lost your profit, though.”

“I have other things to trade,” she says, looking at him, gauging. “We can split the profits. You still earned your share.”

“I’m still gonna keep a close eye on you,” he says, with a quick, furtive look. Like he’s trying to be defiant, but it’s almost a question.

“As long as you can help with the boat,” says Emori, her shock overwhelmed, even if only for a moment, by that strange warmth, this time a calming force. “If you follow my lead, you might just survive another day, John Murphy.”

“I think I’ll last more than a _day,_ ” says John, and she can see though his pretended nonchalance.

That’s when she knows he’ll stay with her.

~

There is a secret greed inside Emori that she never knew existed before. How else to explain the giddiness that lightens her so often these days, even at the urgency to rebuild their supplies and keep their cover after betraying the woman in the flying machine. After losing Otan to the City of Light.

She has lost so much.

But she has John, now. The glow of having him has not yet faded, and seems to grow stronger every time he smiles at her.

It is a steep transition for him, but a smooth one. He knows how to survive day-to-day but Emori has had to survive her whole life, fighting for every inch she could take and knowing that no one would ever give her more.

John knows. And better, he listens. Fortunately, he is a watchful pupil, picking up skills around the boat and on land at an acceptable pace. Soon he even begins offering useful suggestions of his own. If Otan were with them, the possibilities of their alliance would have been limitless.

Otan—

She can’t let herself think of Otan too often without wanting to beat her fists against something, but she knows that he would have kept his eyes on them, with how often she makes excuses to touch John, see if the grooves of her fingers might be impressed into his skin, both the good and the bad ones.

It could be calculated. If John likes her touch, it is a way to keep what little she has. But she covets his just as much.

Her kiss to him had been on the cheek, a gesture of thanks, and the meaning of which was to impress upon him that, to her at least, he would never be the bad guy. He’s killed two people, apparently for attempting to return the favor in kind. She’s killed countless more in the name of her own survival, none of it needless because she could never afford to be soft. John, she suspects, still has a hidden softness about him, one that could threaten his survival if he did not choose to follow her lead as he does.

After their decision to stay together is made, she spends a lot of time thinking about kisses, the surprising softness of his cheek, despite the jut of his bones below the skin. She’s seen how he looks at her – even that time in the desert, when he could almost barely meet her eyes, even when she had a knife against his throat and the banked fire behind them went soft and blue at her gift to him.

Other kisses follow, in the days that pass.

The first time John initiates a kiss, he cups her face in his hands like something delicate, and the part of her that is hard and easily amused would be tempted to tease, were it not for her own sudden breathlessness, realizing that whatever soft thing in him that she has taken lengths to keep safe seems to have found a similar softness in her, one she didn’t know existed. The same feeling that made her touch his face and flirt and compelled her to make him smile.

It’s so dangerous, especially when Otan isn’t here to watch her back, to see what she cannot. She should take steps now to guard herself, make contingencies should John not be what she thinks he is.

But she ignores it. Ignores the whisper when John brings her leaves, like one of those clumsy village courtships that she is barred from. Ignores it as the kissing becomes a regular, even expected, part of her day. It vanishes completely when they make love the first time, and he reaches for her hand. She leans back, her other hand pressed against the bare skin of his chest, eyebrows furrowing.

“What are you doing?” she asks, and the question comes out harsher than she intends it to be, almost an accusation, and John freezes, eyes wide.

“I—you didn’t take off your glove,” he mumbles, flushing, slightly awkward.

Emori’s had lovers, before, and usually she leaves the wrapping on from habit, almost as a courtesy.

She eyes him suspiciously. “You want me to take it off?”

He nods, short and quick, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. His clear nervousness convinces her; John has no ability to deceive her. So she lets him take her hand in both of his again, and watches closely as he starts to unwrap it, to see what he does. Even with her blood singing as it is, if she has to cut this encounter short, she will.

But he doesn’t flinch or draw away once her hand is bare, her long fingers splayed open. Brings it up to his mouth to kiss the palm, eyes flicking up to her to watch for her reaction, his gaze still soft even with this new heat. It makes her clumsy when she goes back in to kiss him, unmoored, tipping him on his back, but he laughs and so does she, and when they curl up under the furs they’ve stolen, she reflects that softness doesn’t have purpose. It can just be.

She has never seen her own hand as a stain – that is the word that others have for it. And John is the only other person she’s met to think along her lines.

~

Emori has always been capable of love.

What she holds in her heart for Otan cannot be anything but. Two discarded children who found kinship and took to calling each other brother and sister. She misses him so much it aches. But the man who persuaded him would be a clever opponent, and she must plan for that. Later. Right now, her and John need to focus on their own survival.

The voice in her head that has always whispered to her keeps whispering that she owes loyalty only to her own survival, not John’s. That she should be prepared to leave him, if needed.

But in truth, the thought doesn’t even cross her mind. Maybe because he already survived her betrayal once and still came willingly with her. Maybe because he’s the first person she has ever truly liked of their own accord. She doesn’t even test him, his loyalty, except in words, to tease him and ask him closer. He is the first person she has met who is like her. Now that she has him again, she wants to see if this feeling is to be trusted, this delicacy. She has only ever protected her own before.

John tells her what little he knows about where Otan has gone, fishes the chip Otan would have swallowed out of his pocket. She doesn’t take it from him. Its slate gray color and the symbol upon it makes her shudder in revulsion. John does not spare her, but she thinks he makes an effort to be kind, and that soft thing that stirred in her when they first met stretches out even further, wanting to see that softness in him again. He lets it out so easily around her.

It’s laughable, later, when John says that going after Otan is not a survivor’s move. What does that say about what she has done with him?

It would be sensible to let him go after their argument; their alliance clearly severed. But it turns out, she is all too greedy. When he refuses to follow, she barely hesitates to go after him. John is wrong – people can come back in this world. Even in the months after their first encounter, when Emori had no way of knowing that his survivor’s instinct was so strong, she feels like she had been unconsciously scanning every horizon, every shoreline, looking for him.

So, she pursues him. Two heads will be better than one if she is to rescue Otan, and more than that, she wants to make it as clear as possible to John that she considers him hers.

Emori knows what is necessary for survival. Her affection for John is not. Where she once knew how to cut her losses and run, she finds herself tensing for fight, not flight, drawing a knife that is nothing compared to the men who have pushed her boy to his knees into the dirt, the blood pulsing through her veins and screaming at her to get him, _get him!_

But he shakes his head, so slightly that the men above him don’t see it, and she stays her hand, heart already aching, as he’s dragged away.

She should do what she planned to do with Otan. Bide her time, collect more resources, strategize. But fear makes her hasty—all she can think about is the knife at John’s throat, what he has told her of his torture at the hands of Trikreu and his own people. Worth backtracking to find Jaha, worth giving him the bold proposition that she needs to take back what she has rightfully stolen from him, and expect him to help her.

She should have expected that betrayal. That the chip on her tongue would do more than show her John’s location.

~

She watches herself go into Polis and set up shop, watches as she waits for the Heda to come through with her Flamekeeper. She hears the rumors, and rather than letting them tear her heart apart she remains whole. She can fix her flaws in the City of Light and she has. She wants John to feel the same, to cool the flames of hurt she knows licks at his insides and eats at him.

She finds him loping through the streets, tailing the Heda. She’s taught him well. He’s happy to see her, clings as readily to her as she does to him, and there’s a shadow under her happiness that strains to reach John that she doesn’t quite understand. Why the urgency of it, when there is no need? The grip of her arms around his waist is her happiness to have him solid with her again, and her determination to follow him.

“I’m his lover,” she tells the Heda in her throne room, any fear or desire for self-preservation muted, assured. It’s not the jealousy when she heard rumors of the Heda and her Flamekeeper that drive her. But she wants it to be clear – John is not the Heda’s plaything. He is Emori’s lover, and she is his. That’s how it has been these last few months and that’s how it will continue. She doesn’t know why John looks at her with such hurt – once he joins her in the City of Light, he will understand. He will forgive her, as is right.

~

She’s ready to run after her self is given back to her. Polis is not safe for her kind, and her relief at reuniting with John dissipates and despair takes root instead. The self-loathing curdles in her gut, the things she said, the things she did to nearly kill one of the only people she has ever loved.

But John doesn’t take this betrayal deep in his breast, as he probably should. As he did with his own people. Instead, he asks her to come with him. To stay safe at his side.

It’s an offering of forgiveness. And assurance, that the love she traded upon is not gone.

Emori wets her lips and says yes, and John rewards her with the same hopeful smile that he gave her early in their time together, of his happiness with her.

Her self-loathing loosens.

But there’s no time to rest. Praimfraya is coming, and they need to find safety. They make an alliance with John’s people she doesn’t fully understand, and she can’t stop watching them, ready for betrayal, to be as expendable with them as with anyone else.

But she overreaches and is nearly sacrificed anyways, and John can’t protect her, though he tries, using his words because his hands are tied. And she can’t bear the thought that he might die again because of her, so she begs him to do anything otherwise.

She wakes up to argument, with John’s pale, tearstained face above her and another having taken her place.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her later, when they are wrapped around each other, the door to their room barricaded closed. “I didn’t protect you.”

“Don’t be,” she says. He did, in the end.

~

John keeps his promise.

One way or another, he ends up stealing her from the earth. Freak or not, she was once a daughter of earth, and now he has abducted her and taken her to the sky. Nevermind that she consented – the way the gravity pulls at them afterwards, it is a jealous parent.

But the sky—space is so beautiful. Seeing the expanse of it, those nights in the Dead Zone, pales in comparison to what she can see now. This is her home, for now. John scowls and groans about the inconveniences of living up here, and there is something under that, the fact that the void around them took things from him, things that Emori never even had, but they are here, together, and curl up together, ready to make it a home.

Space closes its hand around them.

~

The days and nights in space are long and cold. And the people who are strangers must no longer be, by sheer necessity.

Emori sets about making herself useful, as she planned to on the ground. To her own surprise, her skills at foraging and improvising and surviving are valuable on the ship. Her curiosity about the tech, for the first time, has an expert she can take her questions to—Raven. Raven who teaches her, and opens up a way of fixing up the Ring and how to make it home, and how to play—to have things other than survival on her mind. She learns to trust Bellamy, finds a comfort with Monty and Harper and their kindness. Even Echo, mistrustful at first, is someone who has also spent her life on the ground, and that one shared thing between them even when their stations had been so different, ultimately brings out something new.

Against everything, she finds a family in space.

But something she doesn’t expect overcomes her skills and they is the demons in John’s mind, the ones that lock him up, so tightly not even her fingers, once so light, can work the mechanism to find him again. Not when she is working with gears and wires these days, a very different kind of work.

It isn’t bad the first few years—John works just as hard as the others at making sure they don’t die, and at first he seems glad that she is finding a place for herself. But something starts to close him off, he grows restless and dark, and she can’t reach him anymore. The softness retreats behind a needle-sharp cover that makes her bleed each time she tries. Eventually, the distance between them and between John and the others forces her to make him leave, before she gets sucked away too.

Emori loves space. But space took John from her, and that sourness doesn’t leave.

It ought to make it easier to let go of him, that what has become an unexpected source of joy is poisoned by him. She tries, reminds herself that he couldn’t let her belong somewhere that wasn’t only with him, and they can’t do that anymore, they don’t have to do that anymore.

But that soft part of her, that has grown to accommodate a family she never expected but is still so weak for him, screams otherwise. Even when she chose to be better, to be a part of something bigger, that greedy thing in her still holds a hopeless want that John can still belong to her. Her heart still belongs to him, even if she knows better than to let it have its way. She almost hates that part of herself. She pretends that she has no claim to him, no more than any of the others, in the hopes that it might become a truth but it’s more like a physical pain, like she took a knife to herself trying to carve out her love for John Murphy.

She fails, and fumbles, and he snipes and she lashes back and it all hurts but it’s almost irresistible, to have him hold still under her attention, and to have his again, no matter how it cuts.

When John stays behind on the prisoner ship, the knife keeps carving in, cutting at her ribs and she almost wishes it would just slip clean through and pierce her heart to just end things. In some ways, the pain keeps her focused on not falling into those old feelings.

But after they return to Earth, stumble across John in agony, sharing it with him—it’s too much. The shock that courses between them from his collar when she reaches out instinctually to touch him, to try to ease his pain, leaves her breathing hard and _frightened,_ more than she already is.

No matter how angry he made her, how hard it was to avoid him, there was never any danger of losing him in the Ring. There’s a very real chance she could lose him on the ground. Too many places to get lost. Too many places to hide. It is a truth that she hadn’t had to confront in the Ring, that maybe it was only possible to be apart because he couldn’t leave, not really.

John is _hers_ , and she refuses to allow it even a shadow of time where she might lose him. It is an action that requires no thought, to scramble out of the rover as he does. To stay with him. To not lose eyes on him. Even if she’s still angry at him for sinking so far, not taking her hand, forcing her to walk away for her own protection.

It gets so confusing in the rocket, because then it seems like John thinks that she was the one who let go of him. Threw him away, even.

As if she would ever have let go willingly if she had seen a path forward together.

But that confession, however bitterly given, helps them recreate a shadow of their old understanding. It isn’t that his love was gone, and in moments on the ground, even bruised and battered as they are he seems to come back into himself, back to being the boy she saw in the desert, the fire back in his eyes. They break his collar and set a trap and it’s just like old times. He kisses her into the forest floor and the heat that claws through her is nearly triumphant, not only with their victory over the men who might have hurt him, but an exultation that he is still hers, even as she rolls them and presses his back into the dirt, her hand on his throat as his eyes gleam at her against the dark, even as she warns him to expect nothing more from her.

She’s realized that it’s not a question of wanting him back, because he never left her. It’s a question of wanting him wholly, but wanting to be herself wholly, too.

But it’s not good, that he’s only come into himself when they need to fight for their lives.

It’s shameful how much the soft thing in her that she no longer views as weakness hungers to see him like this, even as her rational mind holds firm, their moment in the forest notwithstanding. It won’t matter if they know the cause of the problem now if they can’t fix it for the future, and John’s head isn’t there – he’s focused on making sure they survive, all of them, which is both better and worse. Better because it seems that his capacity for care is deeper than his behavior on the Ring had let on. Worse because when there isn’t life or death for them again, he might fall back into despair.

But Emori keeps close, because even if she doesn’t want to be one half of a whole with him, she wants him right where she can see him.

It makes her _so angry_ that he keeps throwing himself away, out of her sight, even in pursuit of being good.

He’s hers, still.

Earth will die and she gives up trying to think of him as anything but that. It doesn’t matter if they are together or not – as long as there is breath in her, she is going to make sure that John Murphy lives another day.

~

She gets him back, eventually. Monty might have carried his body but John is the one who carries the pieces of himself back to her, even if over a century passes in between.

Their rooms on Sanctum are inconveniently far from each other.

When everyone else is settled for the night she slips out of her room and down the hall, taps on the door with her larger hand as has been their custom. John’s face is tired and his gaze hollow still, and her heart aches at the sight of it. Their reunion has been unspoken, more or less, given the new dangers they have had to face, but they need to. She’s nearly lost him twice in too-short a timeframe, give or take a century, and all she can think about is how small and fleeting they are. If she only has one lifetime, so be it, she will spend it with John.

Even with the sadness that has been stuck in him for so long, he welcomes her in, makes room for her even in the darkness. He still shakes his head when she asks him about being dead.

“I can’t,” he says, softly. “Not yet. I’m sorry.”

“As long as you do, when you can,” replies Emori, and then kicks off her boots, so that he knows that she has no intention of leaving.

So she climbs into his bed, crams in close because it’s only built for one, and it feels both good and familiar but strange, too. He’s gotten thinner, she notes with dismay, and he moves slowly on the side where she stabbed him in a red haze, and it nearly brings tears to her eyes, that she did this to him. That after everything they’ve done to keep each other safe that she nearly succeeded in killing him. She tucks her face into his shoulder just like she used to, but he still sees, and it’s not surprising.

“Don’t cry, Emori,” he mumbles into her hair. “I keep hurting you.”

“I should say that,” she says, her voice watery, because it’s finally safe to admit. Six months of hiding the soft parts of herself from him were too much. Not again. “I never wanted to hurt you either.”

It’s a truth that seems to cover a lie. He hurt her, badly, and it was right to walk away from that hurt. It was less right to use sharp words against him, to lash out when feelings which were not old but refused to be excised would rise up again, threatening to suck her back into such a deep black spiral. Fear has always been turned to sharpness in her, and she regrets that she wielded it against him.

“That makes two of us,” agrees John, turning his head to kiss her hair, and then Emori lifts her head so that his mouth can meet hers, instead, and then she shifts, but carefully, over him to deepen the kiss. To be with him like she hasn’t had the chance to do in so long. John follows her lead and she almost wants to cry at how carefully he holds her, just like old times. She digs her fingers into his shoulders, presses them under his shirt as they pull it off over his head together. She lets her fingers sink into him as he sinks into her, holding him like she’ll never let go again.

~

Only John would try to give her forever and mean it.

On the ground, there had not been marriages as there were before in the old days. Everything she’s learned of the old ceremonies of Earth came after they went to the Ring, the old movies they watched. The rituals usually struck her as silly and overdone, but something sweet all the same.

She starts to understand the appeal, when John slips down on one knee before her.

He offers her immortality—freedom from the necessity of survival. Freedom to choose, and to be each other’s for all eternity. What a perfect proposal for a once-hungry thing like her.

She can’t betray her friends and she won’t let John, either, but she knows they’ll forge their way forward together, whatever it takes. No risk is too great for them, after seeing each other far into a future that she never could have dreamed of back in the Dead Zone, not when she once used herself as bait because the odds of survival were so slim that any risk was a worthy one.

Now, what risk could ever exceed that first encounter, when she left a boy in the desert despite coveting him, with nothing but a whispered gift to lead him back to her?

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure, I have not watched the full series. But these two fascinate me to no end. Any feedback on their characters more than welcome.


End file.
